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Within our increasingly futurist orientation, there often seems to be little room for the past. But if this week’s events are any indication, yesteryear casts a very long shadow on contemporary life. Between the flap regarding the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, you’d be hard put to avoid history’s long reach.

Lukasz Baksik
In a cemetery in the town of Topczewo, in northeastern Poland, a Catholic gravestone has been primitively carved out of a matzeva. Source: Tablet, credit: Łukasz Baksik
While visiting Amsterdam, Justin Bieber, like so many tourists before him, made the obligatory pilgrimage to the Anne Frank House. At the conclusion of his visit, the teen idol innocently expressed the hope that had Anne Frank survived, she would have been a big fan: a “belieber.” In no time at all, his remarks generated quite the hullabaloo, placing the story of Anne Frank and her family once again within our sights.

Several days later, the debut of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews made front page news. In the works for several years now, the museum not only chronicles the Polish Jewish experience but also seeks a form of closure. “You can’t put the pieces back together again, but you can build bridges,” explained Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who’s responsible for the core exhibition.

Another arena in which the past intrudes on the present is most painfully and soberly apparent in the stunning photography of Łukasz Baksik, which was featured in this week’s Tablet.

For several years, the Polish photographer traveled throughout Poland with an eye towards finding and photographing Jewish tombstones (matzevot) that had been incorporated into the landscape as building blocks and cobblestones. His work gives a new, and entirely sinister, meaning to the practice of recycling.

In one photograph, a tombstone, turned on its side, is “repurposed” as the cornerstone of a storehouse of farm equipment. In another, fragments of tombstones are patched together, helter-skelter, as the exterior wall of a cowshed. In a third photograph, a Hebrew name or phrase peeks out amid the smooth cobblestones of a neat and tidy town square.

Baksik’s work packs quite a wallop. It unsettles. At first glance, you’re not quite sure what you’re meant to see: An urban street scene, perhaps? A pastoral setting? In the absence of people, these images don’t give you too many helpful hints. But the longer you look at them, the more details accrue, until you realize that what you’re seeing are pieces of the Jewish past. Quite literally.

It’s the fragmentary, elusive nature of things that makes Baksik’s photography so compelling. A visual metaphor for history’s relationship to the present, it reveals an unvarnished reality in which the past makes itself felt in bits and pieces.

When American Jews first discovered the Jewish community center, or JCC, way back in the 1920s, what drew them in droves was the novelty of its indoor pool and well-equipped gym.

Today, the JCC’s constituents are just as likely to be drawn by the art on the walls as they are by the prospect of exercise. Two current exhibitions, one at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan and the other at the Washington District of Columbia Jewish Community Center, underscore the increasing importance of the gallery to Jewish communal life.

Courtesy of Lori Grinker.

At the Upper West Side home of the JCC, photographer Lori Grinker, in collaboration with her cousin, Richard Grinker, an anthropologist at the George Washington University, takes the measure of her far-flung family. Grinker’s aptly-named show, Distant Relations, which runs through January 5th, focuses on the ways in which her relatives, citizens of Ukraine, South Africa, England and the United States, come to be at home in today’s world.

Whether taking contemporary photographs of old-time images that are evocatively arrayed on a desk much like a still-life, or capturing her young cousins exuberantly at play on the soccer field, Grinker celebrates the Diaspora and with it, the elusive meaning of connection. ...continue reading "Pictures at an Exhibition"

Ever since the late 19th century, much of what we know, or think we know, about the Middle East is derived from photography, whose images run the gamut from ancient ruins to latter-day landscapes scarred by conflict, from scenes of renewal and affirmation to those of despair and anguish.

For years, the American Colony Photo Department in Jerusalem was the source of many of those images. The stereopticon slides, postcards and souvenir albums that bore its imprint, and which can now be found at the Library of Congress, focused on the seeming timelessness of the region’s landscapes and the people who inhabited it, on continuity rather than change.

The work of Sharon Ya’ari, one of Israel’s leading contemporary photographers, is something else again. Like his predecessors, he, too, trains his sights on the landscape, but where they saw only stasis, Mr. Ya’ari sees movement. Reverence was the stock-in-trade of the American Colony photographs. Sharon Ya’ari’s body of work, in striking contrast, places a premium on irony.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress's collection of American Colony Photo Department.

Currently in residence at GW, where he has the distinction of being its very first Schusterman Foundation Visiting Artist from Israel, Mr. Ya’ari will be giving a talk next week – on October 18th, at noon, at the Library of Congress – in which he will be interpreting a number of American Colony photographs against the grain of his own work.

The juxtaposition of these two compelling, but markedly different, aesthetic and cultural perspectives should make for an illuminating experience and one that I hope many of my readers in the DC area will be able to attend.

As we’re sure to discover, when it comes to the Middle East, there’s always more than meets the eye.

Now that grades have been submitted, the seniors have graduated and cap and gown have been returned to the back of the closet, it’s time to take stock of what the Program in Judaic Studies has accomplished over the course of the past academic year.

Whether exploring the millennial history of Jerusalem, taking the measure of Israeli culture, learning about the making of Jewish books, reckoning with the American Jewish experience and the challenges of memory or meeting weekly with contemporary Jewish writers, our classes have deepened our students’ critical encounter with the richness and complexity of Jewish arts and letters, geopolitics and philosophy.

report card
Flickr/AJ Cann
The faculty, too, has been energized by a wide array of informal, work-in-process presentations given each month by its colleagues on topics that encompassed art, politics and the self, the ancient Near East, medieval England, late 19th century Germany and contemporary Latin America.

Public programs, meanwhile, have enlarged our audience as well as our opportunities for partnerships with neighboring institutions. From the Cedar Film Retrospective, which was held on campus as well as at the D.C.-JCC, to “Tough Guys,” a cooperative venture with American University and the Foundation for Jewish Culture; from the annual Fleischman Lecture at The Phillips Collection to a behind-the-scenes tour of the new National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, the Program in Judaic Studies has made a point of extending its reach into the community at large.

As we close the books on this academic year, we look forward to expanding our repertoire of courses and public events for the fall term. For starters, GW will welcome its very first Schusterman Visiting Artist from Israel -- Sharon Ya’ari is his name -- who will offer a very special honors course, “Eye on Israel: Photography of the Middle East,” as well as deliver a public talk hosted by the Department of Fine Arts and Art History.
...continue reading "Report card"

This article, which first appeared in the Forward's blog The Arty Semite, is part of a cross-posting partnership with the Forward.

By Menachem Wecker

Though about half of the 16 artists in the current show at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C., are Jewish, curators Eloise Corr Danch and David Zuckerman unabashedly admit there is nothing Jewish about the exhibit, beyond the Jewish venue.

In the catalog to “I’ve Gone Looking for that Feeling Everywhere: An Exhibition of Emerging Artists,” which hangs through Nov. 2, the curators identify “an insistent urge to examine and discover” as a thematic tie-that-binds.

Orrery courtesy of Sam Zuckerman

“This exhibition celebrates the idea of art as the product of (or byproduct) of that curiosity, of the artists’ need to engage their surroundings and indulge their fascinations,” they write, insisting the art is “visceral, emotional, curious, playful,” rather than “steeped in concept or theory.”

In fact, not only do the curators say there isn’t even anything Jewish, or even spiritual, about the works in the show — though they refer in their statement to “the restless yearning spirit that drives the action” — but the title derives from a Denis Johnson novel, Jesus’ Son, about a drifter.

But Sam Zuckerman, David’s cousin, says his contribution to the show — which is in fact the first work of art he has ever made — has at least a partial Jewish component.

...continue reading "A gadget for Gods and days"

This article, which first appeared in the Forward's blog The Arty Semite, is part of a cross-posting partnership with the Forward.

By Menachem Wecker

According to the MoMA website, Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe screen-print series challenged "the concept of the unique art work by repeating the same mechanically produced image until it appeared to be drained of all meaning."

It's tempting to cite Warhol's Marilyns as the inspiration for the 18 screen prints in Miriam Mörsel Nathan's Greta series, each of which shows a different colored version of the same dress.

But whereas Warhol used redundancy to emphasize triviality, Mörsel Nathan's series is intentionally repetitive, leaving no color palette untried in its search for the answer to a particular question.

Leafing through pre-World War II photographs, Mörsel Nathan, former director of the Washington Jewish Film Festival, discovered a picture of her aunt Greta, whom she had never met. When she started making prints based on the image, she realized she had no idea what color to use for her aunt's dress.

"The series of screen prints is of the same dress but in many different colors, as if to say to my aunt Greta, 'Which of these do you like?'" says Mörsel Nathan in a wall text at the exhibit "Memory of a time I did not know…" at the Washington D.C. JCC's Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery. "There is little that I know about my aunt…These walls of many dresses remind me of what I don't know."
...continue reading "On Marilyn Monroe, Aunt Greta and a Dress of Many Colors"